2015 Tokyo Motor Show to return to October after schedule mishap

TOKYO -- The Tokyo Motor Show, accidentally booked last year to overlap with rival shows in Los Angeles and Guangzhou, China, will return to its traditional late October slot in 2015 in a bid to boost overseas attendance at what was once Asia’s premier auto exhibition.

Next year’s Tokyo show will run Oct. 29-Nov. 8 at Tokyo Big Sight, the waterfront convention center it has occupied since 2011, organizers said today.

Press days will run Oct. 28-29, with Oct. 29 consisting of media coverage and advanced previews for special-ticket buyers in the afternoon and evening.

“The dates for the 2015 show return the Tokyo Motor Show to its late-October time frame, traditional through the 2009 show, to avoid an overlap with motor shows in Los Angeles (U.S.A.) and in Guangzhou (China),” the event’s organizer, the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, said in a news release.

The 44th show will include passenger cars, commercial vehicles, motorcycles, parts, machinery and tools as well as automobile-related services, JAMA said.

Exhibitor registration runs Oct. 6, 2014, to Jan. 16, 2015.

The 2013 running of the biennial show attracted 902,800 visitors, the most since 2007, before attendance plummeted with the global financial crisis. But last year’s show ran just 10 days, compared with 17 in 2007, giving it the highest ratio of visitors per day since 2005.

Still, the last show was not without its hiccups. For starters, the Detroit 3 brands were no-shows for the third straight time, leaving electric vehicle maker Tesla as America’s sole representative.

Organizers also tinkered with the dates, hoping to find a sweet spot between the fall shows in Paris and Frankfurt and the year-end holiday season. But when JAMA moved the event to late November, after holding it in December 2011, organizers discovered, to their dismay, that the press days overlapped with those of the Los Angeles and Guangzhou shows.